For Nigerians in general, the year 2022, no doubt was an admixture of the good, the bad and the ugly. On all fronts – social, political, economic, legal, et all, it was a year of agony. As in previous years, insecurity pervaded the landscape: terrorists and bandits reigned with impunity in many of the states especially in the North East,
North West and North Central. The separatist agitators, Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, literally crippled the South East economically while the daredevils struck occasionally in the South-south and South West.
Although the Federal Government of President Muhammadu Buhari promised to address the insecurity challenges early in the year, the country was jolted on March 28, 2022, when terrorists hit an Abuja-Kaduna
train in Katari, Kaduna State, killing eight persons and kidnapped 62 passengers. For months, the gunmen subjected the kidnapped persons to untold hardship, collected huge ransoms from their families as they released the victims in batches. The terrorists were so audacious as they held the victims for almost six months in the bush in Kaduna State and freed the last batch on September 6, 2022.
For most of 2022, Nigerians were overwhelmed by high-profile abductions, killings, and extremist insurgencies. In June, the terrorists struck at the St. Francis Catholic Church, Owo, killed at least 40 persons and wounded 80 others during a Sunday service. The killings became an everyday affair in states like Zamfara, Katsina, Niger, Borno, Sokoto, and Kaduna. IPOB enforced a sit at home order in all the five South Eastern states while also launching deadly attacks on government offices, prisons, homes of politicians and community leaders.
The list of mindless killings and kidnapping is endless. The attacks tasked the security agent to the limit. Yet, the
perpetrators of evil were never nabbed or brought to book. But Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the outlawed IPOB, was intercepted in Kenya and brought back to Nigeria. He has since been in captivity.
Unprecedented jailbreaks were recorded in many parts of the country last year, the most devastating being the attack on Kuje Correctional Centre in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT. In the attack, terrorists bombed the prison walls and left about 800 inmates free, many of them being kingpins of Boko Haram. Till date as many as 60 of them are still at large. The Islam in West Africa Province, ISWAP, a breakaway faction of Boko Haram, claimed responsibility for the attack and later released a video of the incident.
In the education sector, Nigeria witnessed the longest strike action of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU. On February 14, 2022, university lecturers began a long drawn battle with the Federal Government, and forced authorities to put the tertiary institutions under lock and key for nine months. This dealt Nigeria’s tertiary
education system a big blow.
In May, Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a Christian student at the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, was killed in a gruesome manner by her fellow students who accused her of insulting their religion. Amidst the pervading insecurity, Nigeria’s political parties managed to conduct their primaries to produce candidates for theFebruary 2023 general elections.
The two leading parties: All Progressives Congress, APC, and People’s Democratic Party, PDP, came up with Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar, respectively. Two other contenders :
– Peter Obi and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso
– emerged on the platforms of Labour
Party, LP, and New Nigeria People’s Party, NNPP, respectively. There were, of course, contestants from other fringe parties. A total of 18 political parties are fielding candidates for the February 25, 2023 presidential
elections. They have all since flagged their campaigns.
Many politicians failed to secure tickets, the most prominent being Senate President Ahmed Lawan who lost in the APC presidential primaries. A placeholder, Bashir Sheriff Machina, refused to step down for him to return to the green chamber. Former Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu is cooling his heels in prison after he was charged with conspiring to transport a boy to the United Kingdom in order to harvest his kidney. Ekweremadu, 60, and his wife, Beatrice, 55, had been dragged to Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court in West London.
The wife was granted bail while her husband remained in custody until the next hearing of the case in January 2023. Nigeria witnessed severe floods in a decade last September which killed over 600 people and displaced 1.3 million. from their homes. In many states, houses and farmland were submerged and crippled economic
activities.
In the sports arena, the Super Eagles exited the round of 16 exits at the Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon. Nigeria failed to qualify for the Qatar 2022 World Cup. Yet, there were some achievements in athletics, para-sports, and even football. Tobi Amusan set a 12.12 seconds world record in Oregon. Later, she retained her Commonwealth Games title in Birmingham, England with a new race record of 12.30 seconds. She also made it a successive Diamond League Trophy win with a new world record of 12.29 seconds. She won the Nigerian, African, Commonwealth, World and Diamond League titles.
The year 2022 went down as the scarcity of petrol, aviation fuel, and even kerosene. It was a year when 133 million Nigerians were classified as poor while those in authority engaged in mind boggling corruption such
as the former Accountant-General of the Federation, Ahmed Idris, who was remanded in Kuje prison for alleged diversion of N109 billion public funds. to the tune of about N109 billion.
On the economic front, rising inflation at 21.47 percent made nonsense of workers’ earnings. According to the World Bank Nigeria’s growing inflation rate reduced the existing minimum wage by 55 percent and raised the number of poor by five million in 2022. Also, the unemployment figure stood at 33.3 percent. The standard of living fell drastically and the country wallowed in debt, raking up as much as N77trillion by year end.
The naira crashed to an unprecedented low-level exchanging at N820 the US dollar between October and November. By year end, it came down to N730 to the dollar. To forestall economic collapse, the Central Bank of Nigeria, redesigned the naira, forcing people to return old notes, about N2.84trillion to the banks. On December 15, 2022, the apex bank introduced the redesigned notes in N200, N500 and N1,000 denominations. It said the step became necessary to also stop terrorists holding on to “large volumes of money outside the banking
system used as a source of funds for ransom.”
Notably, the year 2022 was one of serious economic challenges for millions of Nigerians. We hope the outgoing and incoming governments will take positive steps to pull a greater percentage of the country’s 133 million people out of poverty in 2023.